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I’ve been working since I was fourteen at 10:00 a.m. and leave at 8:30 p.m., so I’m barely ever with him. I hope he realizes when he grows up that I did all this so he could have Jordans and Nikes and nice clothes and a fridge full of Danoninos. We kids can be ungrateful little shits. I picked up Iskender and put him in bed, kissed him on the forehead, and pulled his blankets up.
I took off my necklace, tossed it out the window, and painted my lips red with Jordana lipstick. Soon, even though I was crying, I spread my wings.
Gringo dream or whatever. I rode the Beast ’cause it’s free: all you do is take off, run, run, jump, and you’re on. ’Course, only if you get a good grip, ’cause if not the Beast will crush you with its steel hooves. If you’re lucky, it kills you, or else you’re lame for good. But life’s a gamble and I went all in, ’cause why the fuck not.
They didn’t get how I could be Mexican, as Mexican as I am Black.
The border isn’t what you think, or what people say it is. The border is a hungry monster. A bottomless pit that feeds on work, sex, drugs, and women.
They put up pink crosses here, too, in memory of the dead girls of Juárez. They say there’s more signs for desaparecidas than for dances. I came looking for live music to dance to but, just my luck, what I found instead was this brutal desert that devours women, carves them up, disappears them, swallows them whole.
